29 February 2012 5:41 PM

Before I begin, perhaps I could be told in what way I don’t understand what ‘begging the question’ means? I always love a bit of pedantry.

Now, to business. Some contributors here are engaging in what I regard as a straightforward smear campaign, on the basis that I have offered a limited defence of Vladimir Putin and (much more importantly) an attack on his critics for inconsistency, for being themselves critical of Mr Navalny, as they would be if he were not their ally.

I have also criticised the wider inconsistency of liberal interventionists, who condemn Mr Putin for wrongs he has committed, but overlook identical or comparable wrongs in other countries and other leaders. Once again, inconsistent outrage is phoney outrage.

I will repeat here a comment I placed on the ‘If not Putin, who? thread:

‘A contributor hiding behind the name of 'Dr Finlay' (A.J.Cronin's amusing creation), asserts :'This piece has interesting similarities to those written by left-wing US intellectuals who visited the "workers' paradise" of the USSR in the 20s and 30s and to those written by English right-wingers who visited Herr Hitler in the 30s. They were misguided and so are you.' What an extraordinary claim. I suspect its author, whose real identity we'll probably never know, will never appear here again and so won't answer this. But in case he has the courage of his anonymous convictions, perhaps he could give some evidence of the alleged similarity. I see none ( these people, well-described in David Caute's 'The Fellow Travellers' and , interestingly, also examined in detail in my discussion of the Webbs in my book 'The Rage Against God', closed their eyes to the faults of the Soviet regime for reasons of ideological sympathy. Mr Putin has no ideology for me to sympathise with.

'Nor did I in any way seek to hide or minimise the evils of his regime. On the contrary, as any fair reader must surely accept. Nor was I conducted through Moscow by state officials. Most of those who helped me, and spoke to me were as it happens opponents and critics of Mr Putin, all of them entirely independent of the state, and it was through them that I found Dmitry, which is why I was sure he wasn't a plant. I might also add that Russia still has a surprisingly free press (journals with small circulations can say pretty much what they like, it is only when they become seriously influential that they come under state pressure) and little is hidden. Nor was I an innocent. Unlike the fellow travellers of the 1920s and 1930s, I lived in Russia for more than two years, speak a little of the language, have independent sources of knowledge there, and some experience of the way in which the country works. Unlike the correspondents of the time, I wasn't under pressure to conform to a pro-government line to keep my job (see the accounts of the business by reporters such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons etc) I will ignore the other comparison, which is simply a stupid insult, and presumably the reason why the contributor lacked the courage to say who he really is. I assume the apparent supporter of Colonel Gadaffi posting here is in fact a fake, trying to be satirical on the 'Borat' model, If he's a real person, perhaps he could say so, and explain a little more about himself.’

I don’t seem to have had any proper response to this, which seems to me to deal with and dispose of the claim that my article is in any way comparable to such stuff.

The allegation is baseless, and purely designed to smear me, by confusing the ill-informed.

Now along comes Mr ‘Candide III’ (what happened to the first two?) to say I suffer from ‘an unwillingness to examine or search for uncomfortable facts’

Oh, yeah?.

Who wrote this then:’ Mr Putin is without doubt a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government. His private life and wealth are a mystery. His personality cult – bare-chested tough-guy, horseman, diver, jet pilot – is creepy and would be laughable if it were not a serious method of keeping power. The lawless jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is his direct fault. The hideous death in custody of the courageous lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is a terrible blot on Putin’s thuggish state. The murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko are symptoms of the sickness of modern Russia. ‘The general cynicism of the Russian government is breathtaking’ ?

Why, I did. How can this be squared with the accusation above? What unwillingness to search for or examine uncomfortable facts? Precisely the same facts were to be found in an article taking the opposite position by my old friend Edward Lucas, published in the Daily Mail two days after mine had been published in the Mail on Sunday.

I think any search of the laudatory books, articles and statements of fellow-travellers of any or all of the totalitarian or authoritarian regimes of modern history would not be able to uncover a comparable passage. Perhaps one of my critics would care to try.

Now we come to Mr ‘Andrew Wyke’ who in two separate comments (one on ‘Our Laws…’ and one on ’Morals, Mr Putin…’ attempts to suggest that I am in some way allied to National Socialists. He does this with some serpentine subtlety (The old technique of saying that he, Mr Wyke is of course not suggesting this, but that people may think it). Example:

‘Anyone who gives the BNP’s manifesto just a cursory glance will see that Peter Hitchens and Nick Griffin more often than not agree on both ’leftist’ economic and ’rightist’ social policies. This is not for one moment intended to suggest that Peter Hitchens has arrived at his agenda from the same perspective as the overtly racist Ku Klux Klan-styled Nick Griffin. But my point is that the vast majority of casual observers out there may not realize this’

Well, as a swift check of ‘BNP’ in the index will show, they have no actual excuse for 'failing to realise this', and it is a smear that has been rebutted and in my view utterly refuted here many times before. If this is a real person, and he intends to stay here, Mr ‘Wyke’, if such he be, may need to come to some understanding about such claims if he wishes to carry on posting here. But my suspicion is that like ‘Dr Finlay’ we will not hear back from him, at least under that name.

Mr ‘Wyke’ uses precisely the same reptilian technique when he seeks to endorse ‘Dr Finlay’.( who alleged ‘This piece has interesting similarities to those written by left-wing US intellectuals who visited the "workers' paradise" of the USSR in the 20s and 30s and to those written by English right-wingers who visited Herr Hitler in the 30s. They were misguided and so are you.’

Mr ‘Wyke concludes ‘ Despite Mr Hitchens’ protestations, this is precisely how most people (beyond the Daily Mail’s core National Socialist readership) will perceive his comments about Russia.

Ah, they will *perceive* them in this way, will they ? I wonder how he knows (see below) But will they be right and just to do so? Surley that is the point. But is he interested in the pursuit of the truth

Mr Wyke then reveals something interesting about himself, to which I would draw the reader’s attention. He speaks of ‘the Daily Mail’s core National Socialist readership’

I must ask Mr ‘Wyke’, if he exists, what he means by this extraordinary throwaway slur, buried in what appears to be a generally rational argument (this may be too kind, on second thoughts. Quite a lot of the contribution by Mr ‘Wyke’ is swirling pigswill, actually, see below ), what his evidence is for it and if this sort of thing does not reveal him to be some sort of ultra-dogmatic leftist who adjusts the facts to fit his world-view.

It is as if a bank-manager at a Rotary dinner, in the midst of a speech on savings regulation, suddenly begins to take off his clothes and shout ’cock-a-doodle do!’.

Everything that has gone before, and all that comes afterwards, seems in some way less convincing.

He then says ‘Dr Finlay is not calling Mr Hitchens a Nazi-sympathizer or some kind of communist fossil,’

1 . How does he know the inner thoughts of ‘Dr Finlay’? How well-acquainted are they with each other?

2. Actually, it seems to me that this is precisely what ’Finlay’ is seeking to suggest.. ‘They are misguided, and so are you’. Well if we are not misguided in the same way, what does that matter? But that is the insinuation, as who can really doubt?

Interesting that this should be stimulated by an article which points out the dubious and *actual* ultra-nationalist past of Mr Navalny, the hero of the anti-Putinites, who prefer to ignore or avoid this awkward fact.

Mr ‘Wyke’ trundles out the ancient facts about the long-dead Lord Rothermere and his long-ago flirtation with Oswald Mosley and his befuddled remarks about Hitler.Many others, including I think Winston Churchill himself, were willing to say favourable things about Hitler and Mussolini, when they were merely bloodstained killers and tyrants, rather than enemies in war and (in Hitler’s case) a racialist mass-murderer. All regretted it and repudiated their support, I think (unlike many Stalin supporters who continued to their graves making excuses for Communism, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm still does). Generally, those who get exercised about Rothermere don’t get exercised about Stalin’s apologists. I have always thought the worse of both.

Conservatism is not ‘fundamental to fascist ideology’ first because this use of ‘Fascism’ to describe parties and states other than those specifically called ‘fascist’ is itself either a giveaway of Mr Wyke’s political sympathies, or shows him to be very ignorant of the origin of such things.. It is a propaganda concept adopted by the USSR in 1941 to avoid embarrassment over the rather recent (1939) Nazi-Soviet pact, and the phrase ‘National Socialism’. Given that Communist and National Socialist troops had recently marched in a joint victory parade through the formerly Polish city of Brest-Litovsk (film exists) the expression ‘National Socialism’ was unwelcome in the USSR. Also it was itself not all that different from Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’ . Fascism doesn’t really have an ideology, but to the extent that it is sustained by any ideas at all, they are corporate, statist and far from conservative. As for the separate phenomenon of National Socialism, the clue’s in the name.

Mr Wyke continues ‘The Daily Mail even warned about the ‘flood’ of European Jews entering Britain fleeing persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Which does kind of explode Mr Hitchens’ frequent assertion that the British knew little of the Nazi persecution of the Jews at the time we (belatedly) declared war on Germany.’

I have never, let alone frequently, made any such assertion. This is another smear. I have said that the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews did not begin until after the war had begun (in fact not until after the invasion of the USSR) and that Britain did not go to war with Germany to save the Jews (nor did she succeed in saving any, unless you count as ‘;saved’ those left still alive in the death camps at the end of the war, whom we did not life a finger to save, while busily bombing German civilians. In any case, it is regrettably true that the Red Army played a bigger part in their rescue than we did).

The Daily Mail was obviously wrong to speak in such terms. Who would disagree? Does he think I do? Am I in some way responsible for the repudiated remarks of a long-dead proprietor of the Daily Mail? How? If not, why mention it? (Smear, of course).

I am then accused of saying that ‘Vladimir Putin is some kind of paragon of virtue and common sense when it comes to interference in the internal affairs of other nations’.

No, I did not use such terms. I certainly said nothing about virtue. Nor did I use the word paragon. I was careful to list his crimes. But I explained why he is selectively hated for crimes which , in other countries, and committed by other leaders, western media ignore or excuse. Selective outrage, I say again, is phoney. Mr ‘Wyke’ makes no attempt to engage with this point because he cannot. He prefers the smear.

He winds up with some foolish drivel about religion, which he plainly doesn’t understand, and then says ;’ I find it rather disturbing that Mr Hitchens has nicer things to say about the likes of Putin, Assad and Gaddafi than he does about Cameron, Mandela or Obama.’

I have never said anything ‘nice’ about either Muammar Gadaffi or Bashar Assad. I doubt very much if Mr Putin thinks I have said anything ‘nice’ about him (let me repeat he is ‘a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government’) I have in fact said complimentary things about David Cameron (recently here about his response to the Bloody Sunday inquiry report) , and I am happy to say here again , as I’ve said many times elsewhere, that Barack Obama is an engaging person and a fine writer. I think I have also said that Nelson Mandela’s generosity and forbearance are praiseworthy, as they are, though he also has many faults, including his friendship with, er, Muammar Gadaffi, and has served to provide a front for the very much less lovely ANC.

Mr Wyke writes as if he knows what he is talking about and has researched my past statements and views. But he doesn’t. And he hasn’t. What’s dispiriting about this is that his nasty smears are an irrational and spiteful response to what is basically a reasonable dissenting opinion, thoughtfully expressed. And that I have yet to see any of the more sensible contributors defend me against this sort of thing. I think that if people like Mr ‘Wyke’ get away with this stuff, the whole tone of this site sinks.

I should obviously have dealt with several other subjects. But when I’m smeared I must defend myself, or it goes out on the web unchallenged.

Share this article:

02 May 2011 3:43 PM

President Obama says 'Justice has been done' on Osama bin Laden, and I'm inclined to agree with him. While I'm still unsure that bin Laden played as large a part in 11th September 2001 as he boasted, he did boast, and was without doubt in general responsible for many cruel murders. Obviously I should prefer him to have been tried properly, but capturing him alive would have been hugely difficult and dangerous, if not actually impossible, and his own many public admissions, nay gloating avowals, of guilt make a trial superfluous.

But the many more-or-less liberal politicians and commentators who now exult at this death have a problem that I don't have. I believe in the death penalty, as deterrent and retribution. They don't. Had he fallen into the hands of some EU tribunal, bin Laden would have faced life imprisonment in some Dutch celebrity jail, doing his basket-making alongside various Serbs, and a few Croats for good measure, while the kitchens toiled to provide him with halal meals. This refusal to execute murderers is supposed to be a principle, so wouldn't be affected by the huge numbers of murders involved in this case. Shouldn't they then be condemning this execution too? On what morality or legality is it based, if we do not accept the death penalty?

And if they are not condemning it, why not?

I can cope with soppy liberals. I can cope with macho boasters. I know where I stand with either. But soppy liberal macho boasters are too much for me. If the death penalty is wrong, it's wrong, and they should say so. This mission could have had no other end.

Something similar is going on in the apparent attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi, which the Libyans say has led to the deaths of his youngest son and three grandchildren. Official sources deny that this is the purpose of missiles repeatedly aimed at compounds in which Gadaffi may live. In that case, what are they doing? And what moral basis do they have for their outrage against the Libyan regime, with which they had excellent and productive relations six months ago?

There are other questions about this bin Laden business. You may believe in 'al Qaeda' if you wish. I have yet to see any evidence that there is such an organisation, or if the phrase has anything other than a vaguely general application to a vast variety of Islamic armed militants loosely if at all connected to each other. I think this novelistic bogey is an invention of journalists and spooks (and politicians) all of whom have reasons to promote its importance.

If this organisation has now been decapitated, can we now declare the 'war on terror' over? I doubt it. Airports are going to be even more oppressive for quite a while. Our soldiers remain in Afghanistan. And so on.

Was there ever really such a war? Or was something else going on, during which the 'West' actually appeased the very terrorists against whom it was raging? I set out in my book 'The Broken Compass' (reissued in paperback as 'The Cameron Delusion') an alternative explanation for the events of 2001. I pointed out the following facts:

People sometimes wonder about the timing of the outrages. Here's a possible explanation. The terrorist assaults on the USA were immediately preceded by the UN conference on 'anti-racism' in Durban, during which the verbal attacks made upon Israel and the United States by Arab and Islamic delegates were so virulent that the delegations from the USA and Israel walked out (on 3rd September).

The murders in Manhattan and Washington DC were met with a wave of joy across the Middle East, from Beirut to Gaza. This wave only diminished (and even then, not totally, especially in Gaza) when local Arab leaders realised that the vengeful fury of the USA would be terrible if their rejoicing became widely known among Americans. On 16th September 2001 the Washington Post (and several other major US newspapers) reported that the Palestinian Authority had been trying to suppress film taken of Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrating the outrage. 'Palestinian officials have told local representatives of foreign news agencies and television stations on several occasions that their employees' safety could be jeopardized if videotapes showing Palestinians celebrating tha attacks were aired. Broadcast news organisations operating in the Palestinian-ruled portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have complied'.

In other words, stop showing this in the West, or your people won't be safe in areas under our control. Censorship? I should say so. If you remember seeing any of this stuff (and I do, particularly of smiling women distributing sweet pastries) this explains why it has since completely dropped out of the archive narrative.

On 17th September 2001 several provincial big city US newspapers (including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) carried a story presumably from wire services or syndicated from other newspapers with foreign bureaux, which described how the Palestinian Authority had confiscated and then censored an Associated Press videotape showing marchers in Gaza carrying a portrait of bin Laden. My book speculates on why this story did not appear in more major US papers.

Next, I would draw to your attention the pre-suicide video of one of the actual 11th September hijackers, shown on Al Jazeera in September 2002 (and very briefly on some Western stations) a year after the event. Abdul-Aziz al-Omari (believed by the FBI to have been responsible for the hijacking of the American Airines plane that was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center) was shown wearing a chequered 'keffiyeh' headscarf, of the type associated with the Palestinian cause.

What was his aim? In his own words, his planned murders were to be 'a message to all infidels and to America to leave the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting the cowardly Jews in Palestine'.

There is much more about this in the chapter entitled 'A Comfortable Hotel on the Road to Damascus', in my book.

But here's the really important bit. While the 'West' was bombarding sand and rocks in Afghanistan, largely irrelevant to the issue, the USA was behaving very differently in the Middle East. In a series of urgent and hastily-arranged missions, it sent first General Anthony Zinni (December 2001 and March 2002), then Colin Powell himself (April 2002), to meet the Palestinian chieftain Yasser Arafat. US troops were withdrawn from the Arabian peninsula in 2003, as it happens an action demanded by the mass-murdering terrorist al-Omari. Most striking of all, on 10th October 2001, was George W. Bush's declaration of his personal and Presidential support for a Palestinian State. For the USA as a country, and for a supposedly conservative Republican President, this was an enormous change of view. In May 1998 Hillary Clinton had made a similar statement - and it had been swiftly disavowed by her (Left-wing Democrat) husband and by the entire administration.

What, if not the attack of 11th September 2001, brought about these momentous changes in US foreign policy? Have we all been looking in the wrong direction?

I'd add a couple of other thoughts. I was amused by Mr Obama's use of the phrase 'Deep in Pakistan' to describe Abbottabad (named after a British army officer, by the way and still somehow retaining that name nearly 70 years after the Empire ended). It's amusing that Pakistan is the sort of country into which one can go 'deeply'. Would one say 'Deep in France' or Deep in England'?. And if one did, would one use the phrase to describe a substantial town a couple of hours' drive from the capital?

I must admit I had always thought that bin Laden was in Quetta, a rather remoter (or deeper) spot. I treasured President Hamid Karzai's wry remark some years ago that Bin laden was 'either in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and he definitely isn't in Afghanistan'.

But this discovery does raise the question 'What didn't they know about bin Laden's hiding place, and when didn't they know it?

Share this article:

21 November 2009 10:29 PM

Why do some people hate the Monarchy? It is a strange form of bitterness.

What harm has Prince Philip ever done to the alleged comedian Ben Elton, that Mr Elton should call him a ‘mad old bigot who wishes it was still the war’ and then describe the Queen as a ‘sad little old lady who lives in state-sponsored accommodation’?

Both these jibes lack wit, style or substance.

Nobody who actually served in the war has any illusions about it.

The Duke of Edinburgh is clearly one of the most level-headed and drily humorous people in public life.

What is wrong with little old ladies, without whom our lives would all be much poorer?

And this is a fairly mild version of the sort of abuse that a certain type of person thinks can be rightly aimed at the Sovereign and her consort.

Now, I’m all in favour of abusing politicians and other voluntary public figures.

And in idle moments I can Google myself and study the wide (though unimaginative) range of personal insult that is hurled at me by my critics.

I can’t say I enjoy all of it, but I have to learn to take it.

But it is different when it comes to the Queen.

With two notable exceptions, for which I have criticised her and always will (no gongs for me, thanks), she has stayed out of politics for her entire reign.

Where she has intervened - on Northern Ireland and political correctness - her view has been a good deal closer to Mr Elton’s than to mine.

She did not choose to be Queen, and would clearly have preferred to have been spared the crown until much later in life.

She took it on as her plain duty, a word Mr Elton probably thinks is laughable.

Mr Elton neither knows nor cares about any of this. He is just a creature of fashion who has made a lot of money by telling modish jokes to people like him, who think their opinions are terrifically advanced, nonconformist and clever.

In fact these opinions are as nonconformist as jeans and trainers.

They have got them off the television, from their teachers and their rock-star heroes. They have never thought about them for an instant.

They instinctively hate the Monarchy because they have been brainwashed by the cultural revolutionaries.

They claim falsely that the Queen lives an extravagant life. Piffle. She breakfasts out of Tupperware, while modest, unassuming republican Air Force One costs £390million.

They pretend she is powerful, when the seat of absolute power in this country is Downing Street.

They seem to think that a republic is automatically more free than a monarchy. Tripe.

North Korea is a republic and East Germany and apartheid South Africa were republics. Yet of the seven longest-lasting law-governed free nations in the world, five are constitutional monarchies.

Republicans are ignorant, stupid, thoughtless and malign - and it is time they were subjected to the mockery they mete out to the blameless couple in Buckingham Palace.

Better body armour is not the answer to this futile war

Media outlets that support the futile Afghan war have developed a weaselly way of trying to get out of responsibility for the deaths that inevitably result from the policy they back.

They go on and on about the lack of helicopters, or - as last week - they highlight an alleged problem with body armour.

Reading the headlines, you might think that Rifleman Michael Fentiman, who died bravely doing his duty in Helmand, was killed because he had not been issued with new body armour.

This isn’t so. The new armour would not have saved him. Nor, I suspect, would extra helicopters.

What would have saved him would have been an earlier end to this war, which has no purpose and which is already destined to finish in withdrawal.

The only question is when. Make it soon.

Easy ride from the oily BBC

Guess which one of the following tough questions a BBC reporter didn’t ask the Opposition leader on Wednesday morning.

1) Why are you so popular, Mr Cameron?

2) Will the Queen’s Speech really lack substance, Mr Cameron?

3) Can I oil your bike chain for you with my tongue, Mr Cameron?

The answer is, she asked only number two. Here’s my question. When will the people of this country grasp the significance of the Corporation’s love affair with the Tories?

*********************************

More on the media tail wagging the political dog.

Just how grovelling is the relationship between the Tories and the Murdoch empire, which for years supported Mr Blair and Mr Brown?

I hear that a Shadow Cabinet member penned a pamphlet about broadcasting earlier this year, but was told by one of the Cameron inner circle: ‘We have to show it to James Murdoch first.’

No pamphlet seems to have followed. Further details welcome.

No mystery about Pullman’s mission

People who write about the anti-Christian children’s author Philip Pullman - now apparently rewriting bits of the Bible - have oddly taken to saying that he ‘reportedly’ said: ‘I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.’

Why the use of this cautious word? Has the sensitive Mr Pullman cast doubt on this?

I don’t think so, though I suspect widespread knowledge of his agenda may damage Christmas sales of his kiddies’ stories.

He said it in an interview in the Washington Post, one of the grandest and most reputable newspapers in the world, given to a lady called Alona Wartofsky and published on page one of Section ‘C’ on February 19, 2001.

I have a copy for anyone who’s interested, including Mr Pullman.

*******************************

Interesting, isn’t it, that David Cameron rolls over instantly and gives up when faced with a real battle against the EU, but fights like a tiger, putting forth all his strength, to install a marriage-wrecking anti-monarchist London liberal as one of his candidates?

Tory loyalists who continue to support this man - and get angry with me for telling the truth about him - are asking to be trampled underfoot.

*******************************

Barack Obama has been criticised for his deep bow to Japan’s Emperor Akihito. I disagree.

The bow was simple good manners, and good manners are one of the many wonderful things about modern Japan.

Much more significant was his kowtowing to China later in the week. Mr Obama is the first U.S. President to have gone to China as a supplicant, aware that power and wealth are passing from Washington to Peking.

Western statesmen no longer deliver lectures on human rights and Tibet to the Chinese leadership, because they are afraid to do so.

This is only the beginning.

*******************************

Why are cultural trendies so keen on prostitution - a violent, wretched and miserable way of life?

Joanna Lumley famously played an apparently happy and successful tart in that odd film Shirley Valentine.

Whose fantasy is this?

And now we are told that ‘Belle de Jour’ is a supposedly happy and successful academic. I’ll wait for the full story, thanks.

Meanwhile, the National Gallery, meant to display art, hosts an exhibition devoted to prostitution in Amsterdam.

Why?

The truth is, for all its noisy feminism, the cultural revolution is really about self-indulgence, and it ends in the brothel, the opium den and the gutter.

Share this article:

08 August 2009 9:06 PM

Our useless and complacent police can now see their doom staring them in the face. The people of a Southampton suburb have clubbed together to hire private security men to do what the modern police ‘services’ refuse to do – patrol the streets.

As one resident of the area said: ‘We do see the police now and again round here but they are always busy with other things.’

And so they are. This week we learned that two female police sergeants and a ‘Community Support’ officer had shrouded themselves in Islamic gear, apparently to find out what it was like.

It must have made a change from going round telling people to nail down their possessions and barricade their houses because the police can’t do anything about thieves. Or going on diversity training. Much better if they had tried living as lonely pensioners on a lawless estate, listening to the jeers of knots of drunk or drugged-up youths smashing bottles against their walls and urinating in their front gardens.

Or how about being really, really adventurous, dressing up as British police officers instead of members of the LAPD, ditching the huge club, the scowl, the pepper spray and the cuffs and going round the towns and cities alone, approachable and on foot?

Forget it. That’s not what the modern police are for. They’re useless for a reason, not by accident. They have become the uniformed wing of New Labour, not preventing crime or seeing that it is punished – but mediating neutrally between ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ and spying out political incorrectness, in their own ranks and beyond.

Sooner or later, millions of people will catch on to the fact that the police in this country aren’t on their side and don’t want to do what we pay them for. Those who can afford it will hire their own protection. Everyone else will just suffer.

The three main political parties will do nothing.

Obama’s no Joker, and no superhero

A hostile poster of President Obama – altered so as to look like Heath Ledger as the Joker in Batman – has been denounced as ‘racist’. It’s not. In fact, those who make this complaint are the ones with the racial hang-up. They simply wouldn’t make this claim if Mr Obama were not black. And they have no grounds for doing so.

The artist has just copied the hideous make-up applied to Ledger’s face and put it on Mr Obama. It’s ugly. It’s hostile. It’s shocking. But that’s it.

Obama supporters have been used to having it their own way, with their hero portrayed as a mixture of rock star and saint. Having raised expectations to ludicrous, unattainable levels, they must now face – and take some blame for – the anger and disappointment that will follow the discovery that he is in fact a normal human being with no superpowers at all.Dancing to Dave’s tune – Sarah and the Cameronettes

Like so many other features of David Cameron’s Blue Labour Party, the supposedly ‘democratic’ selection of GP Sarah Wollaston as Tory candidate in Totnes is not even as good as it looks.

Having once put myself forward for a Tory candidate selection (purely to annoy Michael Portillo and with no hope of success), I know that the key is not the final vote but the shortlist. If you can’t get on it (and I certainly couldn’t), then nobody can vote for you – and that list is still controlled by party cliques and increasingly by Mr Cameron himself.

Then there’s the question of who votes. If Liberal Democrats and Labour supporters can take part, as they did, what are the chances of a tough-minded opponent of welfare spongeing and mass immigration, let alone a supporter of marriage and low taxation, getting picked? Zero.

As for the simpering about how Dr Wollaston is non-partisan and unpolitical, this just means that the party machine can boss and manipulate her with ease once she’s at Westminster. She may be a wizard with a stethoscope and a blood-pressure machine but without firm views and hard experience she’ll be lobby-fodder like the rest. If you thought Blair’s Babes were bad, wait for the robotic obedience of the Cameronettes.

Ruled by savages and the law of ‘My Way’

The savages are on the loose. The well-behaved, the restrained and the reasonable are in retreat. A woman who complained about rowdy teenagers in a Leeds cinema was followed to a nearby restaurant and horribly attacked.

Bleach was poured over her, which may have damaged her eyesight. The woman was being punished under the new legal code of Britain, which is the law of fear and strength and ‘My Way’. It could have been any of us. Such places exist in most towns and cities and so do groups of noisy youths who think it is their absolute right to behave as they wish.

Then there are the arrogant cyclists, so smug about their carbon footprints that they believe they can ride on pavements and footpaths and shoot through red lights and that the law does not apply to them.And there are the millions of despicable maniacs who text and phone while driving cars, many of whom will one day stand weeping over the broken body of the person they are destined to kill or maim, whimpering ‘I didn’t mean to’. Oh, yes, you did. You knew, and you didn’t care.

Try to reprove any of them and you are immediately the one in the wrong. Their brows cloud with righteous fury. They begin with the assumption that it is you who are at fault. The comparatively polite ones snarl, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’, ‘Get a life’, or ‘What business is it of yours?’

The rest use the kind of words popularised on the airwaves by David Cameron and Jonathan Ross. Or, increasingly, they attack you with confident spite, sure that nothing will happen to them.

* The revolutionary Left, who run politics and most of the media, continue to think of themselves as Che Guevara-type rebels against a crusty, port-soaked Establishment. How can they believe this? Any Establishment person showing any sign of crustiness is immediately threatened with the Thought Police. That’s the whole point of the story of Judge Ian Trigger, who dared to utter some conservative thoughts and now faces a spell in a re-education camp. Left-wing judges – now the great majority – don’t need to be controversial. The law agrees with them.

* As long as people think types like Jeremy Clarkson are the voice of conservative patriotism, the cause of Britain is doomed. The anti-British, pro-EU enemy can easily cope with his coarse, thoughtless rubbish and four-letter abuse. His latest ‘we won the war’ joke, about the Germans invading Poland, might be funny if Britain had actually lifted a little finger to help Poland in 1939, instead of leaving her to her fate for 50 years, and if Britain still had – as Germany does – flourishing home-owned industries, low crime, good state schools and well-run railways, to name a few differences between us.

11 July 2009 6:11 PM

The nation is turning against the war in Afghanistan and it is right to do so.

But disquiet and puzzlement must now become openly-expressed anger, or we shall have to endure years of grief and hundreds of sad processions before anything is done.

Members of Parliament, struggling for a way to redeem themselves, now have the chance to do so by taking every possible opportunity to question this futile, ill-run and ultimately doomed operation.

So far, they have disgraced themselves by allowing it to carry on without any proper debate.

But they must act swiftly. At the current appalling rate of loss, every day wasted means at least one more soldier killed, and several more severely injured.

Many of these have died, and many more will die, because the useless Ministry of Defeat is so bad - and so slow - at buying the right equipment.

This carnage would be bearable only if it had a purpose. Courage and dedication are good in themselves but they ought not to be squandered on futile things by incompetent officials and politicians.

Yet, despite the various official pretexts, none of which stands up to a minute's examination, the operation has no real aim, apart from a pitiful desire to suck up to Washington DC.

Washington will reward us as it always does, with contempt.

In the past century, our supposed 'closest ally' has deliberately superseded us as the world's greatest naval power, strong-armed us into dismantling our Empire, pressured us to abandon our independence to the EU and brutally forced us to surrender to the terrorists of the IRA.

Why, then, should we provide cover for an American propaganda exercise in Afghanistan?

We would be better friends if we stood up for ourselves from time to time.

The Secretary of State for Defeat, a former shop steward called Bob Ainsworth, drones that we will need 'courage and patience' to see this operation through.

Why should we have any more patience with this stupid, discredited, warmongering Government?

As for courage, Mr Ainsworth may possess this virtue for all I know.

But, alas, at the age of 57 he has no way of proving this by volunteering to take part in the 'hard and dangerous' way forward of which he speaks.

This is a pity. I for one should enjoy watching the entire Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet doing a stint of mine-clearing in Helmand.

But there are other forms of valour and there is one way Mr Ainsworth could win an accolade for bravery.

He could admit the truth - that British troops should not be in Afghanistan, that he has no idea what they are doing there, that his department has let them down severely, and that they must all come home.

Now that would be courage.

So how can you tell the real ones from the dummies?

We know that scarecrows have no brains. What about members of the wooden-headed modern police 'service'?

How do we explain the officious removal of a scarecrow dressed in a joke-shop police outfit, and holding a plastic bottle looking vaguely like a speed gun, part of a scarecrow festival in Brancaster?

Norfolk Police took it away and said it was 'inappropriate', that all-purpose bureaucratic word which has filled the gap left since we abolished the concept of 'wrong'.

Eventually, they gave it back but without the 'speed gun'.

A police spokesmoron said: 'An officer removed the scarecrow as it portrayed an incorrect and inappropriate message.

'Speed radars are used to prevent casualties on our roads and to address the irresponsible actions of motorists. They should not be recreated by the roadside in jest.'

Why not close them all down and start again? Even a straw-stuffed dummy would probably be more effective than our absent, militarised PC robocops.

Sex lessons lead to sex. Well I never!

Now we know that sex education works. It makes people have more sex, just as you might have thought it would.

After all, the more sex education we have had in schools over the past 40 years, the more under-age sex, teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions we have had.

But at last we have proof of the connection, thanks to research intended to show the opposite.

Tears of laughter streamed down my face as I read the report of the 'Young People's Development Programme', which exposed several hundred teenagers to fashionable 'harm reduction' material on sex and drugs.

This pitiful, defeatist stuff assumes that the young will have under-age sex and take drugs.

It matily tries to persuade them to do so 'safely' - though you might as well hit yourself hard on the head with a lump hammer 'safely' as try to use cannabis 'safely'.

And the young get the message. In this experiment, the targeted group actually ended up having more illicit sex than a control group who were not given the extra sex education.

The researchers - of course - don't get it. They say it is 'unlikely' that their free condoms and drivelling leaflets made things worse.

Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But if you struggle through the report itself, you will find some fascinating pointers.

They 'expected' a different result. Does this mean they hoped for one?

In fact, they actually say the outcome of the research was 'unexpected'. Try as they may to find excuses for this result, they cannot.

They also cannot cope with their own findings, insisting that 'the unexpected sexual-health outcomes are unlikely to be attributable to the sex education within the programme'. Oh, really? Why not?

Well, because this was a 'relatively small and variably delivered component' (I bet that wouldn't have mattered if the result had gone the way they 'expected' it to).

But also because of 'the lack of previous evidence for harms arising from sex education'.

Some of us believe there's plenty of such evidence. But at least they won't be able to use that excuse the next time the research blows up in their faces.

************************************************************How gratifying that Barack Obama mania was completely absent during his trip to Russia.

For all its undoubted faults, Russia still behaves like a proper country, independent, unwilling to tolerate hostile bases on its border or have its government overthrown by mobs of manipulated teenagers in coloured T-shirts.

The rest of us are mesmerised by globalist drivel, like the people in that creepy Coca-Cola advertisement warbling 'I'd like to teach the world to sing'.

************************************************************Last week it was the G8. Next week it’ll be the G3, or the G5, the G17, perhaps the G20.

Who needs these freebies, ringed by riot police and consisting mainly of grotesquely opulent dinners?

If there really were an economic crisis, wouldn’t these things be cancelled?

Share this article:

19 May 2009 8:41 AM

Before I move on to my main subject, a quick summary of the position, in my unending battle to get conservative-minded voters to act selflessly, rationally and effectively, rather than selfishly, irrationally and ineffectively.

I've done what I can to explain why a Cameron victory, by no means inevitable, would crush what's left of the conservative elements in the Tory Party, and why the Tories offer no salvation of any kind and never will. I now leave Mr Cameron's immovable, unreasoning supporters with this question, though with no very great hope of success. 'So many of you say that Labour, left in office for another five years, would finally ruin the country. What specific policies do you believe will lead to this result, and how would a Tory government differ? Offer specific reasons for believing that it would differ.’ I would add in response to a ridiculous assertion that Mr Cameron is not of the Left that of course Mr Cameron is a man of the Left. He supports, with voice and actions, the dissolution of our national sovereignty into the EU, the continuation of a vast welfare state, political correctness, a surrender to drugs, unrestricted immigration, comprehensive education, the sociological approach to crime and idealistic foreign wars in pursuit of globalisation. If this is not left-wing, then what on earth is? Calling this position 'The Centre' is merely another way of saying that no other opinion is valid or tolerable. I've no doubt I shall get nothing in return except the usual feeble excuses: 'You never say what you're in favour of' (I do, often and in detail) or 'how can you be sure it'll work?' (I can't be, I can only be sure that voting Tory won't work.)

I've likewise done what I can to explain why the BNP should not receive the support of any civilised person. I have examined the BNP. I have met its activists and its leader, and read its key documents, which is more than many of its supporters have done. It contains both pitiful, unhinged Judophobes and convicted criminals. Its own constitution (I point out for the fiftieth time) clearly and unambiguously defines it as a racially-bigoted party. There is no doubt that this specific, declared bigotry loses the BNP important support. No Christian, for instance, can conscientiously support it, as both Old and New Testaments unequivocally point out that all men are made in the image of God, and that Christ does not distinguish between 'Jew and Greek, slave and free'. (It is the Darwinist survival-of-the-fittest merchants whose philosophy underpins fantasies of racial superiority, though they try to wriggle out of this nowadays). Yet the BNP leadership will not abandon it. If the 'policies' they currently adopt (for opportunistic rather than principled reasons) were their real objective, and they were truly concerned for the future of the country, then they would purge themselves both of this poison and of the unrepentant Holocaust-deniers and similar toxic swivel-heads still in their ranks. They could do this out of genuine repentance, or solely out of a self-interested desire for power. Either would be rational actions, and repentance would actually be a genuine step forward. However, their bigotry is their fundamental driving force, and so central to them that they cannot abandon it, which is why they cannot and will not do this, even though their inaction harms them greatly. That bigotry will continue to inform and direct everything that they do. It is central to their purpose and being. And that is why it would be both wrong and mistaken for anyone to vote for them.

BNP enthusiasts don't address this point, because they can't, without admitting that their main motivation is racial prejudice, which they understandably prefer not to do (though this restraint is absent from various nasty websites where BNP supporters, unleashed, let their true feelings show). Instead they make rude remarks about me, which are of course very welcome from such a source. When one of them does address it, or makes an honest effort to do so, I'll respond. Otherwise not. It is sad to see well-intentioned gullible people being fooled by this unpleasant formation. Modern politics seems to consist largely of the well-intentioned being fooled by scoundrels of one kind or another.

Now, back to Mr Obama, or Saint Barack as he perhaps ought to be known. I recently received a missive from a regular correspondent who writes in to abuse me, rather heavy-handedly, though often enjoyably rudely, every time I am uncomplimentary about Mr Cameron. Her latest epistle chides me for being unenthusiastic about Mr Obama, saying I have now been shown to be wrong about this - as if Mr Obama's election victory over the decrepit, baffled John McCain cancels his faults and makes him right on everything. This is not, as it happens, an argument. But even so...

Some of you will have seen that Saint Barack ran into the first serious public hostility of his career on a visit to Notre Dame University, an old-established Roman Catholic college of some reputation, in South Bend, Indiana. The headline on this posting refers to the shouts which echoed across the hall as he addressed the student body and picked up an honorary degree, against the opposition of many American Roman Catholics. They are right to oppose these unjustified and mistaken compliments. I do not think Mr Obama seeks genuine compromise with this great Christian institution. I think on the contrary that he hopes to co-opt it into his machine, and compromise it so that it moderates its opposition to him.

I also do not think that 'Yes, we can' is much of a response to the accusations of abortion opponents. It reminds me of the general empty-headed rock-star worship which became such a feature of Mr Obama's campaign. What, in this instance, does it mean? So far as I know Mr Obama's attitude towards abortion is at the extreme end of permissive, as he will no doubt show when he picks his candidates for the Supreme Court, the USA's potent and unelected third legislative chamber.

(I'm always amused when people attack our House of Lords, which in recent years has been an outpost of independence and free thought, while calling for a US-style constitution, which would enthrone such a court here, autocratic and chillingly liberal.)

'Yes, we can' certainly doesn't mean that Mr Obama can fulfill all his promises. His recent decisions, on military tribunals and the publication of pictures of prisoner abuse, really ought to have given his more gullible supporters reason to doubt. Time he was treated as a normal human being - as he always should have been.